Just how much money do you spend per week on groceries? Too much? Too little? What’s a good measure on our food bills anyway?

A recent poll found that the wealthiest Americans spend more on cheap fast food than likelier demographics—the low-income earners living in food deserts. Wealthy Americans can certainly afford to eat better, and likely many do, but it appears that they suffer from the same affliction most Americans grapple with: feeling comfortable with paying a lot for quality food.

According to the Atlantic Wire, “people in other countries in the world spend a much higher percentage of their budgets, per capita, on food than the less than seven percent we spend in the United States.”

Does America’s wealth come from spending the least amount of money on groceries? Or do we just need to eat less because we’re so sated by our delicious stacks of money? If we weren’t suffering from such severe cases of obesity and poverty, I’d say it was the latter. But, sadly, it’s the former that’s got our food bills all discombobulated, causing us serious health issues as a result of poor, cheap nutrition.

With the exception of the UK, most Europeans spend about ten percent of their income on food. Head over to Indonesia and it’s 43 percent. Granted, lower per capita income, like what you’ll find in Indonesia, often means a higher percentage of wages earned going to food, but there is a healthier balance in food spending, as EU countries demonstrate.

A food bill spending calculator featured on Mother Jones allows you to type in your income, your age, location and how much you spend on groceries. The calculator compares your food bills to the recommendations put out by the USDA, which, not surprisingly, seem a bit low. The data (from 2011) suggests a single woman in her 30s who considers herself a “liberal” food shopper, spend just $316.90 per month on food (not including dining out). That’s just under $80 a week, which is fairly reasonable, unless, you want to purchase organic options. You like high quality olive oil, or don’t blink at paying $8 for a loaf of artisan bread? I just spent $14 on a golf-ball sized nugget of artisan vegan cheese. (Worth. Every. Penny.) Not exactly budget-friendly on $80 per week. And if you’re considering yourself a more conservative shopper, according to the USDA, you should be spending half that—less than $40 per week on food. That’s not even $10 a day for three healthy meals, let alone being able to afford organic options.

The Industrial Food Complex has influenced most of us when it comes to food spending. Why pay $1.09 for something when you can get a similar product for $0.99? Even if you’ve never shopped there, just knowing that Costco exists sets a precedent. Somewhere, this food item is available for less money.

The government subsidizes Big-Ag so that it can keep making genetically modified, HFCS-laden Oreos and Twinkies on the cheap; and inexpensive food is often the yummiest, if not downright most addictive option. That small ball of vegan cheese may have cost me more than twice the price of Velveeta, but it’s something you can only eat a bit of at a time. (Unless you’re pregnant. And vegan. Don’t judge me). It invites savoring and appreciation—two concepts noticeably absent from the American appetite.

As hungry as we are for low food prices, we’re hungrier for instant gratification. We eat like deprived Marines. Like Cookie Monster (RIP). The way the French eat their food—slowly, over hours, with a good bottle of wine and lots of lively conversation—could easily double their financial investment in food. They’re barely done with one meal when most Americans have moved onto the next.

That’s not to say deals aren’t worthy of snapping up to keep your food bills low. But being frugal is not being cheap. When we’re willing to compromise on health, flavor and quality because we think we’re saving a few bucks, we’re falling right into the laps of the processed food industry. The jar of spaghetti sauce is cheaper than buying a pound of fresh tomatoes and a bunch of basil. At least, it appears that way at first glance.

The other caveat here is what propelled us into the age of processed foods in the first place: The notion that began in the 1950s that we’re somehow now too busy to properly nourish ourselves and our families without the help of Tang and Stouffer’s. That we would simply starve to death if it weren’t for the microwave. Being members of an advanced, upright civilization has its perks (looking at you, Google Glass), but a home-cooked meal from scratch just isn’t one of them. The future’s so bland and flavorless.

Except that it isn’t, of course. And allowing ourselves to spend generously on foods that will actually become part of our physical being seems like a moot point to make. In a nation where we have, quite literally, most any food ingredient available within just a few miles from our homes, shouldn’t we be paying more than the rest of the world for this luxury, not less?

]]>http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/how-much-should-you-spend-on-groceries-the-high-cost-of-cheap-food.html/feed/05 Things Every American Should Know About the Farm Bill (and Why You Should Care)http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/the-farm-bill-2012-why-you-should-care.html
http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/the-farm-bill-2012-why-you-should-care.html#commentsFri, 04 May 2012 00:15:02 +0000http://www.organicauthority.com/s1-foodie-buzz/c4-foodie-buzz/the-farm-bill-2012-why-you-should-care/

It's that time again... time for Congress to rewrite and re-pass the Farm Bill. Who cares, you say? Well, you should if you care about healthy food, clean water and how much those things cost.

It’s that time again… time for Congress to rewrite and re-pass the Farm Bill. Who cares, you say? Well, you should if you care about healthy food, clean water and how much those things cost.

Every five years or so, Congress takes another pass at rewriting and passing the Farm Bill, which covers federal spending for farm, nutrition and conservation programs, and it’s up for renewal again in 2012. We’ve rounded up the top five things every American consumer should know about the Farm Bill from the website farmbillprimer.org and the Environmental Working Group.

2. It’s Your Food

Only a teeny tiny fraction of the Farm Bill actually goes to support healthy foods like fruits and vegetables—even though the Obama administration and Mrs. Obama in particular have told the country that fruits and vegetables should make up half our plates at every meal. Because most of the money goes to suppor crops that are grown on an industrial scale and are highly fertilizer and pesticide dependent, the result is that it actually harms the soil, the water supply, and the farmers who are growing healthy foods and organic foods.

3. It’s Your Grandparents and Your Kids

The Farm Bill does do a lot of good things, too, like the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program and the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program which help get fresh fruits and veggies onto the plates of seniors and school children, respectively. But these sorts of programs are often the first to be removed when lawmakers are looking for ways to trim the price tag of the Farm Bill to help balance the budget.

4. It’s Your Environment

While a lot of big promises are made by lawmakers about protecting wildlife that never manifest, the Farm Bill actually did provide more than $4 billion this year to help farmers to conserve soil, clean up the water, and protect habitat for wildlife. But these programs are easy targets for lawmakers looking to make cuts because dirt and water don’t have lobbyists.

5. It’s Your Turn

Even though only two percent of the country is actively engaged in farming, we all have a say in what goes into the Farm Bill. The first step is to educate yourself, and farmbillprimer.org is a great place to start; they have an ongoing roundup of news articles, facts and interactive tools to help us all understand this complex law. Write to your congressperson and let them know that healthy food and a healthy environment are important to you. And then head over to sign the Environmental Working Group’s petition to congress to help turn the Farm Bill into a food bill.

We've all heard of the housing bubble that sent the entire world into financial turmoil, but what if our food system was headed for a similar disaster? Author Vikram Mansharamani of Bloomberg suggests in a recent article that our agricultural policies are leading the food system down the same troubled path.

We’ve all heard of the housing bubble that sent the entire world into financial turmoil, but what if our food system was headed for a similar disaster? Author Vikram Mansharamani of Bloomberg suggests in a recent article that our agricultural policies are leading the food system down the same troubled path.

During the housing boom, banks took advantage of very low interest rates, lots of cash liquidity, government-sponsored financing for mortgages, political policies encouraging lenders to make housing accessible to all, and favorable tax policies. All of these things led to banks lending money to people who never would have qualified for loans before and driving up housing prices with inflated demand. Of course, the bubble burst and resulted in massive forclosures and bank failures and contributed to the worldwide debt crisis… but we don’t have to tell you.

So what does any of that have to do with food? In the 1970s, crop failures in America and the Soviet Union caused food prices to skyrocket, and so the government instituted new food policies designed to keep food prices low. In theory, these weren’t bad decisions, but they have remained in place long past the end of the crisis, all the way to today.

The old policy was designed to discourage farmers from producing a particular crop when supply was high and prices were low. The new policy rewards farmers for producing more and more of certain crops—corn, soybeans and wheat are the main ones—regardless of the price. Basically, this means that farmers can grow corn, for example, literally until the cows come home, produce an infinite supply, and the government will guarantee they get a good price for it.

That policy alone doesn’t seem sustainable, as, in theory, our food system can only absorb so much corn, right? But the system has done a heroic job of trying. Today, farmers produce nearly 4,000 calories of food per person, per day, more than twice the government recommended amount. A lot of that are grains, and a lot of those grains get fed to animals or turned into ethanol, but the average American now eats about 400 calories a day more than we did in the 1980s. And a lot of that is corn—if you look at food labels, some sort of corn or corn byproduct is in nearly every processed food we eat, from a loaf of bread to shredded cheese.

Mansharamani suggests in his article that this system is ultimately unsustainable because overeating (along with poor diet and lack of exercise) contributes to obesity, which in turn contributes to diabetes, heart disease and other health problems. Eventually, there will be a tipping point, where farmers in the U.S. are producing so many subsudized crops that the government can’t pay for it and the US food system can’t do anything with it any more. We’re already throwing out nearly a quarter of all food produced in this country.

What’s the solution? Mansharamani suggests that the government could take the $50 billion it spends on these outdated farm programs and reallocate it to support farmers growing fruit, vegetables and other healthy foods, as well as a national education campaign to get us to understand the relationship between our growing waistlines and our national food bubble.

Food focused author and journalist Michael Pollan is known for his simple approach to nutrition ("Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too Much.") in books including The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules and In Defense of Food, but his pared down approach doesn't end there. In a new video released by the educational initiative campaign, Nourish, Pollan reflects on the value of voting with our dollars, and voting with votes, offering an appealing approach to making changes to America's Farm Bill through the political process.

Food focused author and journalist Michael Pollan is known for his simple approach to nutrition (“Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too Much.”) as demonstrated in his best-selling books including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food Rules and In Defense of Food, but his pared down approach doesn’t end there. In a new video released by the educational initiative campaign, Nourish, Pollan reflects on the value of voting with our dollars, and voting with votes, offering an appealing approach to making changes to America’s Farm Bill through the political process.

“We’re still at the very beginning of what may be a revolution in what we eat,” says Pollan, citing that “So much of our food system is the result of policy choices made in Washington.”

America’s Farm Bill passes every five years, but as Pollan states, “[I]t isn’t really a bill just for farmers; it really should be called the Food Bill because it is the rules for the food system we all eat by and those rules are really lousy now and they need to be changed.”

Proposed changes to the Farm Bill include dramatic cuts that would do little to support the small- to mid-size farmers and do more to support large-scale corporate agriculture. According to Pollan, “The reason we’re eating from these huge monocultures of corn and soybeans is that that’s the kind of farming the government is supporting in the form of subsidies in the form of agricultural research. All the work is going to produce those so-called commodity crops that are the building blocks of fast food.

“Why isn’t the research going into polyculture instead of monoculture? Why isn’t the research going into how to grow organically, how to grow without pesticides? So we need to shift the whole basis of the Department of Agriculture which really drives a lot of American farming to make that more sustainable and that will come by changes in the Farm Bill.”